Where does the Google `site:` operator for site-specific searches get its information?

Question

I have read in many places that one should use Google Webmaster preferably to the site: search operator. However, I would like to know where the site: operator gets its information from?

Here is my situation. I have imported a new blog on Blogger and tried to have the pages added to the index. The problem is that Google Webmaster's index status is updated once per week —too slow for me. Right now, it says no pages have been added to the index yet.

But, when I search site:trovare-parole.blogspot.com, it returns plenty of links.

So does it mean Google has indexed some of my pages yet (and the index status is late) or not? How should I interpret the result of a site search?

Answer 1

I have read in many places that one should use Google Webmaster preferably to the site: command. [] I would like to know where the google site command takes its information from?

The information comes from the same place: their search index.

The problem is that Google Webmaster's index status is updated once per week -> Too slow for me. Right now, it says no pages have been added to the index yet. But, when I use the site:trovare-parole.blogspot.com command, it returns plenty of links.

If the Webmasters information is only updated once a week and these two events happened within a week of each other, then they don't necessarily say anything about each other.

The fact your site: search does return information tells you (at least some) pages have been indexed. But if you want to know exactly how many that is, you'll have to wait until your Webmaster Tools information gets updated. Using site: through the regular search interface explicitly does not return all indexed documents.

Answer 2

The site: command will return all pages Google knows about for the domain provided (example.com) plus subdomains, or for match to the subdomain provided (www.example.com).

Google returns all the pages it has scanned, including duplicate content.

Once scanned, Google has to process all the information and actually index it. So Google's index status is not too slow for you, you just haven't waited long enough for the data processing to occur.

It's a good sign stuff shows for site:, you just have to be patient while Google to does its job to determine whether your pages are relevant, where they are relevant and their ranking in consideration with incoming authoritative links.